Benkai: "Lost Dust2 because of fear"

Fresh from their defeat versus Denmark we managed to get two Singapore players: Benedict "⁠Benkai⁠" Tan and Nevin "⁠splashske⁠" Aw, to hear their impressions and thoughts about TWC 2016.

The duo also plays together in dream[S]cape, so we learned a bit about their team's latest performances and the scene in Singapore in general.

Let’s start with a general question about the team you have here to represent Singapore – tell me how you decided on the players and how that went down.

Benkai: In Singapore the talent pool isn’t really very big so we only have about two top teams which is dream[S]cape and team TitaNs. We originally took two players from TitaNs – moxie, who is here with us, and alecks. And from my team there was me, Nevin (splashske) and Faiz (dejavux). So we basically got the time, figured out the roles and got to the grand finals of the qualifier, where we lost to China 3-0.

But at this event alecks couldn’t make it so he was replaced by tommy, who isn’t in any big team but we think he is good enough to come here. Also ImpressioN who was here last year also couldn’t come.

Talking about your team in Singapore, for the readers that are not that informed on your scene, walk us through what you’ve been doing and what are your plans for the next couple of months?

Benkai: In my team dream[S]cape we’ve been practicing for any big events coming up. The most recent one was eXTREMESLAND in China, where we placed 3-4th besides TheMongolz, we lost against VG.CyberZen in the semi-finals 2-1. We couldn’t attend a few, like IeSF and WESG because the qualifiers overlapped with TWC. Right now we are training for any competition that might come in the future.

First two days of the groups you had two wins and five losses – were you happy with the results, what do you think you could’ve done better on the first two days?

splashske: I think we could’ve done better, but we didn’t know how all the European teams play so we were really surprised with their playstyle.

Talking about that – the playstyle and the experience, I was talking about that with Snappi earlier and he said to me that the experience is something that you probably lacked, especially on the second map versus Denmark. Let’s talk about that match a bit, you played Dust2 first, it was kind of a whitewash, on the second map you were playing very good but you couldn’t close it out in the end. What happened?

Benkai: In the first map we actually had a gameplan down but we didn’t follow it because, to be honest, it was our first time fighting people from other continents. So we had this mental block in our heads, to put it into simple words, we were afraid of them – how they play, their reputation, all this kinda stuff. That is how we lost our first map, because of fear.

In the second map we had some kind of communication issues at the start, and we couldn’t figure out how to counter their Terrorist side until it was too late. We managed to end the half maybe 7-8 to Demark. In the second half we basically told everyone to stop being afraid of them, just go for the kills, imagine you’re playing a PUG game. That’s how we played and we played really slowly, we didn’t rush it like in the group stages – that’s how we got trashed by Denmark in the group stages. That’s what we changed over here but we couldn’t close it out in the end.

What happened on the last round of Mirage? You had so much success on the A site, going for Mid-A splits and getting picks, then you went for a B rush and got completely wrecked. Why did you decide to do that?

Splashke: It was a gamble from Benkai. *laughs*

Benkai: I called for that push because I thought that was a risk we could take. I was thinking they realized we had more success on A than B. And we kept throwing the middle smoke every single round so if we throw that smoke they won’t know where we will be going, but will be thinking we will probably be going A.

So I was thinking why not just take the chance and rush B? *laughs*

The tournament is over for you, but what are you going to take home from TWC regarding experience and stuff, and how did you like it here in general?

splashske: We’ll probably try to take this experience and try to integrate it in our play at home. About the being here, it’s very cold for us, we're used to tropical weather so we need to get used to it.

Any shoutouts or anything you’d like to say to close out the interview?

Benkai: We have no one to shout out two as we don’t have any sponsors in Singapore. Ok, maybe Colloseum, a local LAN caffe in Singapore. Other than that we’re just playing off like passion and genuinely love the game. We are gonna take this experience home and teach other teammates who couldn’t be here and improve.

Professeur writes for HLTV.org and can be found on Twitter.